Liberty Is Dangerous?

NewsMax ^ | 6/16/05 | Ralph R. Reiland

[wagglebee]

The idea of liberty never seemed especially scary to me. That was what we were all about as Americans – people fleeing despotism. "Where liberty dwells, there is my country," declared Benjamin Franklin. I write for Liberty magazine. The Statue of Liberty is the American symbol, a salute to freedom, not to caution or obedience.

I was surprised, consequently, to see John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty," a classic defense of freedom and individual sovereignty, getting an honorable mention on a list published by Human Events of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries."

Human Events, "The National Conservative Weekly," asked a panel of 15 top conservatives to compile a list of books that have done the most damage to the human condition over the past 200 years.

There was no surprise about the books that placed first, second, third and sixth: "The Communist Manifesto," "Mein Kampf," "Quotations from Chairman Mao" and "Das Kapital." All four inspired purification drives that resulted in the mass murder of millions of people by the state.

The other six spots on the Top 10 list are more contentious. In the fourth slot, outranking Marx's "Das Kapital" in its hazard to humanity, is a 1948 study called "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," commonly known as "The Kinsey Report." Human Events claims that this report by Indiana University zoologist Alfred Kinsey was "designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy."

Kinsey's report, said the conservative Washington Times last year, "stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95 percent of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws." One could argue that it's the state that is out of control when 95 percent of a population are classified as sexual outlaws.

It was 13 years after the publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" that Estelle Griswold, the wife of an Episcopal minister, and Dr. Lee Buxton, a licensed physician and a professor at the Yale Medical School, were dragged into court and convicted of providing medical information on contraception to married couples.

It wasn't until four years later – on June 7, 1965 – that the Supreme Court reversed the conviction, maintaining that the outlawing of counseling about or the use of contraception was a violation of the constitutional right to privacy.

Next on the list of dangerous ideas, coming in at No. 5, is John Dewey's "Democracy and Education." Mr. Dewey "signed the 'Humanist Manifesto,'" says Human Events, and encouraged the teaching of "thinking skills" instead of "traditional character development," and thereby "helped nurture the Clinton generation."

The seventh-most-harmful book is "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan, published in 1963. Traditional stay-at-home motherhood was like "a comfortable concentration camp," wrote Friedan. Human Events reports that this founding president of the National Organization for Women was a longtime "Stalinst Marxist" who was "for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley's radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer." We're lucky these well-connected hot bodies they didn't nuke the Republican National Committee.

Dangerous book No. 8 is "The Course of Positive Philosophy" by Auguste Comte. He's the one who coined the term "sociology" and said man could figure out things better through science than theology.

Book No. 9 is Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil." He argued, correctly I think, that the world isn't run by moral rules; instead, "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation."

And finally, the danger of bad economics comes in at No. 10, with the "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" by John Maynard Keynes, published during the depths of the Great Depression. "The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government," says Human Events, referring to the Keynesian idea that governments could reverse downward economic cycles by means of deficits, borrowing and higher levels of state spending.

There's cause for disagreement about the animus against Keynes, Nietzsche, Comte, Friedan, Dewey and Kinsey. But when it comes to the defense of liberty and individual freedom, it seems that conservatives should see that John Stuart Mill provided a wise caution. "Whatever crushes individuality is despotism," he wrote in "On Liberty," "whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."

For the next Top 10 contest, some good conservative editor should ask for a list of the most damage done when conservatives abandoned their principles and pushed for a bigger and more intrusive state.

[wagglebee]

I was shocked to see Mill on the list.

[darth]

How could they miss the books by Ralph Nader? L. Ron Hubbard? Much worse than some of the picks.

[wagglebee]

Or Madame Hitlery's manifestos, "It takes a village idiot" and "Lying Hysteria."

[austinmark]

Two Book's to be added.......(IMHO)

1) On the Origin of Species, -Charles Darwin
2) The Descent of Man, -Charles Darwin


.

[wagglebee]

They definitely should have been on there.

[freepatriot32]

Libertarian ping.To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"Two Book's to be added.......(IMHO)

1) On the Origin of Species, -Charles Darwin
2) The Descent of Man, -Charles Darwin "

This was a list of the most dangerous, not the most enlightening books ever written :)

[Robert_Paulson2]

"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."

Its actually a pretty good quote.
the anti libertarian religiocons would disagree however.

With the current state of affairs, we appear to be headed towards a battle over who gets to bury liberty's corpse.

There are those who want to bury it in biblical interpretations from the first century. Just as others wish to do, in 7th century religous/cultural dogma.

Either way, liberty is toast... for our safety of course.

[dcwusmc]

Good point bump!!!!!

[Hardastarboard]

One could argue that it's the state that is out of control when 95 percent of a population are classified as sexual outlaws.

This is an EXCELLENT point.

[WOSG]

Kinsey's report, said the conservative Washington Times last year, "stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95 percent of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws." One could argue that it's the state that is out of control when 95 percent of a population are classified as sexual outlaws.

DUH, the reason that is a 'most dangerous' book is because it is a pack of lies, written by a sexual deviant himself who studied criminals, including sex criminals as his 'population' and treated it as the 'normal population'.

It was bad science that led to bad cultural consequences. Very appropriate to be on the list.

Mill is more controversial. When this came up in a thread a few weeks ago, I postulated that Mill's embrace of utilitarianism, the predecessor to many totalitarian 'social engineering' type thinking, may be what got him on the list.

[WOSG]

It was 13 years after the publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" that Estelle Griswold, the wife of an Episcopal minister, and Dr. Lee Buxton, a licensed physician and a professor at the Yale Medical School, were dragged into court and convicted of providing medical information on contraception to married couples. It wasn't until four years later – on June 7, 1965 – that the Supreme Court reversed the conviction, maintaining that the outlawing of counseling about or the use of contraception was a violation of the constitutional right to privacy. Classic act of judicial activists legislating from the bench.

This is a quite ignorant point by the author. "Griswold" is the case he is citing and it is a classic Warren court decision, where the US Supreme Court decided the law wasnt progressive enough for them, so they (ie Justice Brennan) invented an excuse - "substantive due process" - to overturn it.

That excuse in Griswold led DIRECTLY to the WORST DECISION BY THE US SUPREME COURT IN 50 YEARS: Roe v Wade. Griswold was the most cited and direct precedence for Roe v Wade, and so this decision he lauds led to the holocaust of the unborn that we've suffered under since 1973.

Just because contraception "should" be legal doesnt mean (a) it's a constitutional issue, (b) USSC should butt into such policies.

This author is seriously out to lunch.

[WOSG]

Actually it's a moot point because Kinsey's data was wrong.

[Bogolyubski]

Excellent point about Kinsey - one of the fathers of junk science. He certainly deserves to be on the list. While I see your point about Mill's utilitarian ideas, there are surely a fair number of more toxic publications than his work.

[Oztrich Boy]

They were put on the runner-up list by theocon idjits who were also down On Liberty.

[Oztrich Boy]

I postulated that Mill's embrace of utilitarianism, the predecessor to many totalitarian 'social engineering' type thinking, may be what got him on the list.

If that was so, they were confused because they should have chosen Untilitarianism.

Or even better, a book by an author actually promoting totalitarian utilitarianism, which Mill wasn't.

Viz His arguments in favour of individuals runnning their lives instead of government
On one hand: Because individuals know what they want for themselves better than government, they are more likely to get what they want (utilitarianism)
On the other hand: even if they don't, planning their own lives is to their moral benefit, and likely to make them happier (utilitarianism)
The Gripping Hand: people, have we forgotten? Government by others is evil mkay?

[dread78645]

The Gripping Hand: people, have we forgotten? Government by others is evil mkay?

You must be confused. This is FreeRepublic.com. Big nanny-state government is hunky-dory just as long as it has a (R) next to the name.

HTH & HAND
;-)

[LowCountryJoe]

Either way, liberty is toast... for our safety of course.

TFF! "...For our own safety of course." That's classic!

[Dumb_Ox]

Liberty *is* dangerous, of course, though in a different way than slavery. Anything involving man is dangerous.

Mill's book definitely belongs on this list. His idiotic "harm principle" is used to undermine any legal support for maintaining the virtues necessary for a free people and checking the vices that undermine republicanism. Mill's kind of liberty makes the free forget how to rule themselves. His utilitarianism, which I don't remember being defended in On Liberty, makes all goverments no different than pirate ships writ large.

As for his free speech, let us recall that prominent men usually only argue for "all sides of the story to be heard" when their side is losing or indeed completely irrelevant. What's worse, his argument tends to treat any social pressure as intolerably coercive, even when it isn't backed by the force of law. This is a self-defeating argument in the long run because once his libertarian state is instituted, the inevitable social pressure against non-Liberal social pressures will make such arguments look like the grab for power they most likely are.

Does anybody know how the far left took over the universities? They made Mill's arguments about free speech and the inevitable success of truth from the process of disputation when they were a minority and their academic departments were dominated by New Deal liberals. This sentiment conveniently evaporated once they were in control.

There is a very good case that Mill himself intended his works to undermine Victorian-era Christianity and replace it with a positivistic "religion of science" out of Comte. Check out the book review The Authoritarian Secularism of John Stuart Mill. (Warning: PDF).

Mill's version of the free society is likely intended to be a transitional state. I am certain that such pleas for liberty in the mouths of many leftist ideologues are also intended to be such transitional states. Those who innocently and uncritically praise Mill are useful idiots in the ongoing destruction of civilization.